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Coming for Christie


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Front Page Magazine:

The Justice Department under President Obama may be unwilling to investigate the New Black Panthers, but it’s apparently intent on scrutinizing that other menace to society – New Jersey’s upstart Republican governor Chris Christie.
This month, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report purporting to show that Christie, who has built up a reputation as a spending-slashing fiscal conservative by taking on New Jersey’s bloated public sector, routinely overcharged the government for hotel stays while in his former job as a U.S. Attorney. Christie exceeded the government’s set rate for travel expenses on 14 of 15 trips, according to the report; on nine of those trips, his “lodging costs exceeded the government rate by more than $100 per night.” These costs, which went over the government rate by between $19 and $242 a night, ultimately totaled $2,176.
The charges are not new. They initially surfaced during Christie’s election fight last fall against Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine, who seized on news reports about Christie’s hotel expenses suggest that he was out of touch with average Americans and lived by his own rules. (Never mind that with a net worth estimated at as $300 million, Corzine himself was hardly the obvious model for an everyman.) At the time, Christie parried the charges by pointing out, reasonably enough, that with just a few rooms offered at the government rate at every hotel, staying within the set government rate was not always possibility. Nevertheless, he explained that he tried to stay at a cheaper hotel whenever that was an option. Whatever view one takes of that particular controversy – and New Jersey’s voters registered their opinion clearly when they voted Christie into office – there is nothing revelatory in the Justice Department’s audit.
Why then is the Justice Department suddenly so concerned with the dated travel expenses of New Jersey’s governor? It can hardly reflect a broader instinct for austerity on the part of the Obama administration. This after all is a president who has presided over a massive spending spree in his first two years in office, spiking the national debt by more than $3 trillion. What’s $2,000 in travel costs, assuming they really are unjustified, next to the government’s two-year spending binge?snip
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